Hi,

I tried your xorg.conf, Dave, but it left me where I was with my own xorg.conf. At least I couldn't see any helpful difference.

I tried automseat too, but after installing all the dependencies and running gdm, it installed with some errors and didn't run, and frankly at that point I stopped caring enough to investigate any error logs.

I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with the response here in the forums. It seems Dave's been much the only one to try and figure this out with me. Thanks for that Dave, I've much appreciated that even though I feel I've wasted too many hours trying to bother anymore. The problem I'm having is pretty much basic functionality, you know. There're two older laptops in the house and both have ATI cards, and neither works with an external two monitor and this operating system. If that's the way things stand and if it has something to do with the ATI card, how can it be news to anyone here? And if it's not news, then why hasn't anyone bothered to chime in and let me know I'm wasting my time trying? Is it because there's a theoretical possibility that something could be done to fix this by someone better in the know than I? Or because everyone's too busy to care writing a new release, and after all, upgrades are fun for everyone, right? No thanks. Chuck

chuck,

Maybe the reason no one chimed in is simply because they don't have any experience of using antiX with an external monitor and didn't want to give useless/wrong advice.
If you still want to try and get it working, maybe open a thread over at MEPISlovers forum. There are more users there and I'm sure there are more people with the knowledge to help.

Yeah, okay. Thank you for dropping a line and thanks for letting me vent some. Because I'm new, I would've appreciated a short"no idea" post from some of you here so I wouldn't have tried as hard to get my head around this.

I didn't realise I should've asked at the Mepislovers forum too. I couldn't find anything there that would've dealt with my problem when I did a search just now, though. Someone suggested trying the display switch function key at boot up, and that did switch the output to the external monitor only, but it went right back offline and the lcd display back on when the display manager started. I tried switching Monitorlayout in xorg.conf to"crt, lfp" and setting clone to true right there as per another suggestion, but that didn't help. From the looks of it, everything's just fine: xrandr and the graphical version show two connected displays, cloned (though that setting's grayed out in the graphical version), and both are using the resolutions and refresh rates I want by default, but the crt's still just plain blank.

Anyway, I'm done with this. There's no point in playing with this when all suggestions are just pot shots with no clear logic to back them up. I'll switch to an offline windows system on that other computer. At least I'll get to keep my books up to date and print that way.